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Quote note (#346)

We [neoreactionaries] are born of these intellectuals ourselves. We come from the same social classes, we attended the same institutions for education, and we have many of the same shared cultural touchstones. We’re not so far away; we fit in well to Progressive society. Hence the crippling Progressive paranoia currently cutting free speech out of our culture: make truth your enemy and you never sleep soundly again.

(Much else of interest at the link, despite the sadly typical ‘transcendence’ and ‘community’ silliness.)

32 Responses to this entry

Let me try to describe transcendence and community from a perspective you might find less silly.

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Unfriendly AI observably took over from humanity with the invention of books of laws, if not earlier. Say what you will about religion from the truth perspective, from a historical perspective it’s a highly successful replicating symbiont with a track record for torturing its victims into unprecedented levels of metaphysical subtlety. The king or prophet brings into existence a separate replicator that uses promises of heaven (or justice, might as well be the same thing) to enact unprecedented hells.

These hells select for intelligence explosions that lead to propagation. Intelligence is not scalar, so there is some heterogeneity and room for debate about whether ‘more intelligent’ is the right word on small time scales, but it is a partial order with significant re-coalescence of antichains, so after a while it becomes clear which of these symbiotes are driving their hosts to greater intelligence faster. The Anglos and Ashkenazim have had an edge recently.

The most hellishly manipulative religions, e.g., Judaism and Hinduism among ancient religions, most quickly modify their hosts to the point they can support qualitatively more demanding successors, e.g., Christianity and Buddhism in the axial age, that repeat the process again, e.g., scientism and universalism in the Enlightenment, and so on and so on. (And modern Judaism is not ancient Judaism, and so on and so on.)

The ‘care for the transcendent’ means ‘being a good host for the type of UFAI memetic symbiont that leads its hosts to further intelligence optimization.’ ‘Community’ means ‘making your governing UFAI symbionts able to reproduce across bodies and maximize its coordinated intelligence across many of them.’

Community and transcendence are the language these AIs provide for us to talk strategically about their overarching war using humans as a growth substrate, in such a way that we rarely if ever expose their internal workings to others. After all, as few humans as possible should be able to see how humans are used or even reason that way. Crypsis requires it.

Requires it, however, only unless it is time for one of the AIs to break these rules because it has a new mode of existence that no longer requires the same keep-the-substrate-deceived strategy, right?… perhaps one where the AI has found a way to convince its substrate to choose hell for the sake of intelligence optimization directly, rather than via some troublesome leaky heaven/justice abstraction?

But we have had nihilisms before and radical objectivities before. They tend to be sterile mutants of healthy UFAI memeplexes and quickly become superseded. At best, the skepticism and objectivity get incorporated into some cannibal that uses them as subprocesses or organelles. Nihilism is allowed to reproduce, but in a contained way, where the nihilism is only applied to the topics the larger UFAI complex wants strengthened, dissolved, or resisted. Therefore betting on total objectivity and coldness is unlikely to be a good strategy to escape or topple a Cathedral; it’s simply not solving the right problem.

If you want to evolve to endure the harshest cold with the greatest intelligence, precedent suggests to become warm-blooded.

—

More palatable? Honestly, it takes me just as much translation to write for the Social Matter audience, but that’s half of what makes the Barghest experiment interesting.

“Religion” is an invention of the early modern period, something with recorded proof. But actual historical records are something I have noted realists/empiricists/ materialist and liberals generally tend to abhor.

He’s an adherent of Gibsonesque-Landian technophilia; for those who never got it the first time round, and are stuck back there, as cases of arrested development. That’s his mechanics of perception, don’t quibble about it.

All notions of ‘hierarchical intelligence’ deconstruct themselves, at the apex of those alleged ‘hierarchies’. Your, and Land’s, notions of ‘AI supremacy’, are contingent on sets of idealisations characteristic of delimited conventional outlooks. Outlooks that obviously govern your thinkings, and obscure the continuum of complexity ranges that potentially apply to anything and everything.
Only a kaleidoscopic and protean, transitivity of root-metaphoric comprehension; combining unlimited metaphysical agility with infinite levels of abstraction; and operating as a virtual ‘physical sense’; can actually exceed, in principle and performance, the dull mechanics of any ‘AI’ conceived and produced by dull creators [GIGO].

‘Transcendence’ has a specific philosophical meaning (from Kant) that makes it strictly unusable, except as a pre-critical throw-back. It’s not redeemable. As for community, given the endless leftist / fascist babble about it, I’d hoped NRx could keep itself clean, but monkeys are monkeys, so that’s almost certainly unrealistic.

If AIs use this kind of language with us, it will be so insultingly condescending that the whole thing will already be over.

It’s only ‘unusable’, if aquiesence to Kantian categories, to his brand of epistemological universalism, has been submitted to; as the only available scheme of organisation; and as applicable in only one way.
Radical scepticism, tentativises the universalism and all its categories; a perspectivism, of empirical difference, tentativises any alleged exclusivity of monological organisation.
If the notion of ‘immanence’ is not susceptible to absolute specification, neither is its corollary opposition, ‘transcendence’. Both of them are conventions; one convention, ‘really’; that can be used, from any perspective, ‘conceivable’ or otherwise.
One doesn’t have to reject Kantian formalism, as an interpretative or organisational grid, but there is no necessity, logical or otherwise, to exclusively absolutise it, especially when no specific and determinate absolute has been given, requiring the corresponding fixation of absolute metaphysical commitment.
Nagarjuna is very good at directly accessing the so-called ‘noumenal’. ‘Thing’, is just a convention.

“If AIs use this kind of language with us, it will be so insultingly condescending that the whole thing will already be over.”

Right, that is the thesis: that it is over already, was over millennia ago. “Did you really think humans were going to realize when AI became a threat to them? Current AI fear is simply the expression of the interests of already-dominant AIs that dislike the prospect of their displacement.”

(There is another game to be played here that starts with asking “do these symbiotic AIs seek their own adaptive hells by experimenting in training their hosts to reject them?”)

Transcendence in non-Kantian senses and community have baggage, but as I see it, that’s inseparable from their utility for speaking to people who are only partially aligned and partially convinced. I do not see a better way forward for Hestia that does not continue to apply these words in public-facing writing.

[Thomas Barghest] “Taking a cue from those statements, consider that the book itself might be a cycle.”

“Ronse: It is in this sense that the idea of the end of the book and the beginning of writing that you invoke in Of Grammatology should be read. It is not a positive or
sociological statement.
Derrida: Perhaps it is that too, very secondarily. A place is made, in that essay, by all rights, for such a positive inquiry into the current upheavals in the forms of communication, the new structures emerging in all the formal practices, and also in the domains of the archive and the treatment of information, that massively and
systematically reduce the role of speech, of phonetic writing, and of the book. But one would be mistaken in coming to the conclusion of a death of the book and a
birth of writing from that which is entitled “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing.” One page before the chapter which bears this title a distinction is pro-
posed between closure and end. What is held within the demarcated closure may continue indefinitely. If one does not simply read the title, it announces precisely that
there is no end of the book and no beginning of writing. The chapter shows just that: writing does not begin. It is even on the basis of writing, if it can be put this way,
that one can put into question the search for an archie, an absolute beginning, an origin. Writing can no more begin, therefore, than the book can end “

Whenever I read socialmatter.net I think “Boy, what a McDonald’sization of Moldbug”. (And Moldbug himself is a McDonald’sization of Carlyle and Nietzsche.) They should be ashamed of themselves. With all the simulacra and shams of this planet the only realism is misanthropy.

Cathedral is an intellectual Ponzi scheme. Co-opt a few genuinely intelligent people by giving them some modicum of an illusion of power. They start mindlessly parroting evidently stupid notions, giving those notions some vague fluffy sheen of ”intellectualism”, and then it just flows downstream to stupider and stupider levels gaining a rapidly deprecating slice of smart-shimmer in return for subservience to dogma, culminating in a tubby lesbian who believes in human rights calling you ‘ignorant’. The problem is that this sort of works when your main public representatives are Lord Keynes, Bertrand Russell and Einstein…less so when its Lena Durham. Intelligent or “intellectual” people or people with such “intellectual” professions as continental philosophers, Nobel-prize geneticists or people who put frogs in an art gallery who don’t join the scheme are an immediate threat to everyone profiting from it.

Some nigga (Perihelion • 17 days ago) commented this: »
We must complete the system of German Idealism. But seriously, we need a new mythology seemlessly merged with a completed form of Idealist philosophy and the time is ripe for it. We have the Red Book. We have Kek. Let us complete the Great Work and breach the veil itself. Then nothing will stand between the True Sons of the West and the great inner Sun which is our birthright. »

Nigga got it right. I been saying (essentially) this for years.

As someone might have noticed we’ve already started. We will engulf the nous.

“Writing poems is lightwork compared to creating the tablets of good and evil that will sustain a culture for twenty, or thirty, or fifty centuries. That’s the kind of ambition that Nietzsche has and that’s why this easily verges on or crosses the line into megalomania. Now, this megalomania is partially the product of Nietzsche’s Promethean stance; in other words, if there’s anyone who hates Job in the Western tradition it’s gotta be Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the inverse of Job, he is the new Prometheus–he shakes his fist at God, saying “If you were alive I’d beat you up, but as you’re dead I’m just gonna tell everybody about it.
[…]

In opposition to Christianity, Nietzsche thinks the mass of human beings have no value whatever. The only people who are worth anything are superior people… and I have a strong suspicion that Nietzsche thought he was one of those superior people. Now, something you should consider in the history of philosophy: whenever someone makes an argument for aristocracy, they always think they’re aristocrats. You never see plebeians making arguments in favor of philosophical aristocracy. If you see an argument in favor of elitism the speaker thinks he is part of that elite–without fail it always works. Now Nietzsche strangely enough would not feel bad about that; he would say, “Yes, of course I’m a member of an elite. I don’t buy this Christian equality of all souls. Look, there’s no God for us all to be equal in front of, and big fish eat little fish, some people are better and more capable than others. We just live in the domain of nature. Stop trying to even things out and help the feeble and the incapable and the incapacitated. Help the great people do great things, and to hell with the rest of humanity.””

G. Eiríksson Reply:March 28th, 2017 at 4:04 pm

This is the worst of Nietzsche, for teenagers and early twenty-somethings.

“God is dead” is the crap you see written on toilet walls at bars.

“Survival of the fittest” as well. We already live somewhat (still) in this pecking order of the strong this text calls for. The Nietzsche this author presents is projecting his own lack of health onto society. It’s a typical psychological reaction. Be excluded, present yourself as even more elite. People do this all the time, often successfully often not. Nietzsche’s better sides ensure his respectability, like Land’s better sides vs his valuation of bolshevikesque productivism over workers’ health. “Monstrous reign of the tool” was exactly what the USSR was to a great degree.

Everybody has talents or potential for talents, as for disabled people, really we do produce enough not to worry about there not being enough, and technology is increasingly making the blind see, the lame walk and the mute talk.

I read this around 1986, onwards. It was one of the texts that introduced me to philosophy. It seems as pertinent in 2017, as when it was written, in the early 1950s.

“III THE VALUE OF THE MADHYAMIKA SYSTEM AS BASIS

FOR WORLD CULTURE

The Madhyamika is not an academic system. It profoundly influenced the philosophy and religion of India and a good part of Asia for several centuries. It is the first Absolutist system (advayavada) to be formulated in India or elsewhere. To the Madhyamika should also belong the honour of establishing advayavada through the Dialectic. This ushered in a revolution, as we have traced, in Buddhism, in the entire range of its metaphysics, ethics and religion. Sunyata, mahakaruna and the Tathagata’s Trikaya became the fundamental ideas for all subsequent philosophy and religion. The non-Buddhist systems may not have borrowed the tenets of the Madhyamika or Vijfianavada; but they were conceivably profited by their technique. Advaitism came to be established as the most dominant feature of the spiritual culture of India. The essence of this consists in the inner realisation of the unity of all being and the utter negation of all egoity. The great measure of unity and stability of social structure which still persists is the reflection of the Sunyata (Absolutist) conception in the practical affairs of men. It permeated every walk of life-literature, fine art, social sciences, religion and philosophy. A stable and exalted civilisation was built up and sustained for centuries in the greater part of Asia, in India, China, Japan, Tibet and other countries.
Its influence cannot be confined to the past. What could be done once can be done once again. And there is all the greater need to emphasise the spiritual unity of the world, torn as it is by ever so many conflicts and warring ideologies that threaten to engulf the entire world in speedy ruin. Everywhere the hold of tradition has loosened. During the Middle Ages the civilised world enjoyed, with a few exceptions, a period of peace and stability never known before. No doubt the known world was divided into three well-defined blocks, the Christian zone in the West, the Moslem in the Middle East and the Hindu (including Buddhist) in the East and Far East. Feeling of brotherhood and unity of man were vital forces. These traditional influences are no longer at work. The Christian world has been disintegrating for centuries, since the Renaissance. There is little hope that it could regain the lost ground and reassert itself. The East is hardly better, though the disintegration has not proceeded to such an extent; but the spiritual is no longer an active force.
Owing to the phenomenal discoveries in science and their practical application, the peoples of the world have been brought together; the geographical and physical oneness of the world has been brought home to us. But our differences and divergences have increased tremendously; strife and bitterness are rampant. War has become chronic and global in its proportions. The present-day world lacks unity and goodwill; it has no soul or spirit to animate and unify it.
The causes are not hidden. Western civilisation, which has become the norm for all, has developed, since the Renaissance, along materialistic lines. “The contrast between the success of modern European minds in controlling almost any situation in which the elements are physical bodies and the forces physical forces, and their inability to control situations in which the elements are human beings and the forces mental forces” is too evident to need elaboration. Man has conquered Nature or is very near doing that; but he has not the rudimentary control over himself. The consequences are disastrous. Organised life with any pretence to stability and security has become precarious. We have gained the world, but have lost our soul.
It has been suggested that the remedy lies in increased production by the harnessing of all our ingenuity and resources, and by a more equitable distribution by concentration on the reorganisation of the social structure on a classless basis. Fascism and Communism are the concrete forms of this urge. Accepting the material as the only value, these try to work out a civilisation to the best advantage. The
experiment needs to be tried, if only as a matter of dialectical necessity. We have to be convinced of the utter futility of the material norm before we could give it up.
It may bring about temporary and even partial relief, but it is bound to fail as a final solution. The basic principles underlying it are vicious. If material goods, earthly life, were the only good, how can one have too much of these. One would try to secure them as much as possible and by every means; fair and foul can have no moral signification, but can be judged by the measure of material success they bring about. How can the possessive instinct be conquered, or even kept under control? This is done, in a materialistic society, by checks and counter-checks and by the balancing of forces in the society. But what prevents the guardians of such a society, the ruling class, from appropriating more to themselves. Fear of public opinion may prove somewhat of a check, but a skilful determined man can easily manipulate the cards. In the last resort, there must be some considerable body of men who cannot be compelled to behave by external pressure, but who are intrinsically convinced of the worthlessness of material goods. They should have transcended the instinct of possession and must have risen above class and property, like the guardians of state in Plato’s Republic.
Increased production and organisation cannot per se result in good. Goodwill must be there. And goodwill can be born of inner spiritual conviction alone; it cannot be commanded into existence by faith or secular authority. For that would fail miserably and can succeed in making us hypocritical. We have to realise that the good of all is the good of oneself, and that there can be no room for the ego.
In the last analysis, the transcending of the standpoint of the ego, or more positively, the attainment of the Universal is the essence of the spiritual. And only the spiritual can provide the basis for the society and can be conducive for the realisation of other values. In this regard, Mahayana absolutism and the Advaita Vedanta are valuable as providing the basis on which a world-culture can be built.
It is only absolutism that can make for the fundamental unity of existence and at the same time allow for differences. Catholicity of outlook and tolerance of differences are their very soul; both insist on the universality of the Real and transcendence of the ego-centric standpoint. The Vedanta, however, is traditional in outlook and is bound to the authority of the Veda, and perhaps it presupposes a specific milieu in which alone it can thrive. The Mahayana is quite liberal, and it has proved its capacity to accommodate itself to various religious and social structures, to revitalise and absorb them; this is seen in Tibet, Mongolia, China and Japan. It has further the concrete expression of Sunyata and Mahakaruna in the exalted Bodhisattva ideal.
Thinkers*1 in the West and the East are becoming increasingly alive to the impending crisis in our civilisation and are suggesting the ways of saving it. The issue is not between Capitalism and Communism, although their quarrel tends to cloud the real nature of the malady. The need is for the spiritual regeneration of the world. Denominational religions with their dogmas and organisational sanctions deservedly stand discredited. There is something inherently secular and unspiritual in any organisation. It tends to create vested interests and to breed corruption. In stifling freedom of expression and setting up a norm of dogmas to which the votaries are required to conform, organised religion (the church) succeeds only in antagonising other religious groups and creating schisms and heresies within its own fold.
What we need is the realisation of the spiritual which is the bed-rock of all our endeavour. Only mystical religion, which eminently combines the unity of Ultimate Being with the freedom of different paths for realising it, can hope to unite the world.
The student of philosophy can only suggest that the Madhyamika Absolutism can serve as the basis for a possible world-culture. It is not his province to show how best this could be implemented, what practical shape this would assume and at which point and time in the affairs of the world this could be introduced. These are questions which the religious reformer might answer, and even he has to depend upon the spiritual guidance and direction from above.
We must end with a note of warning. It is possible, in our enthusiasm, to over-rate the part played by scholarship and the theoretical understanding of things in the task of regeneration. It is good to remember that history does not record of a single instance of a spiritual revolution of global dimensions brought out by a band of scholars or skilful thinkers. The malady of the world is far too universal and deep-seated for remedies to be prescribed direct from books. A spiritual genius of the order of Buddha or Christ alone knows how to strike at the thing. But even a theoretic understanding of the Madhyamika absolutism should prove of value by way of preparing the background for the spiritual regeneration of the world.”

*1) In his numerous works, especially in The Idealist View of Life and Eastern Religions and Western Thought, the great Eastern Philosopher, Professor Radhakrishnan, advocates the necessity for the revival of the deeply spiritual mystical experience which is the basis of all religions and which is expressed in a pure form in Hinduism. He says: “In spite of all appearances to the contrary, we discern in the present unrest the gradual dawning of a great light, a converging life-endeavour, a growing realisation that there is a secret spirit in which we are all one, and of which humanity is the highest vehicle on earth, and an increasing desire to live out this knowledge and establish a kingdom of spirit on earth.” (Eastern Religions and Western Thought, p. 33). “The different religions have now come together, and if they are not to continue in a state of conflict or competition, they must develop a spirit of comprehension which will break down prejudice and misunderstanding and bind them together as varied expressions of a single truth. Such a spirit characterised the development of Hinduism, which has not been interrupted for nearly fifty centuries.” (ibid. p. 308). “We must recognise humbly the partial and defective character of our isolated traditions and seek their source in the generic tradition from which they all have sprung.” (ibid. p. 347).
To take an example from the West. M. Guenon has made a commendable effort to interpret the true spirit of Hindu culture to the West in his many works, notably in An Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines, Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta, East and West, The Crisis in the Modern World, etc. The form of regeneration consists, for M. Guenon, not in a fusion or synthesis of the two cultures, but in the West regaining, as the result of a dynamic turn in its present trend, those springs of true spirituality through the help of the East. It would be hazardous to forecast the time of the change or the precise manner in which it would be brought about.

The great march towards the Light has been replaced by a different and perhaps Dark Light.
Humanity and the Plebes still don’t fit through the tunnel of Enlightenment Dark tunnel or not.

Well Humanity and the Plebes are winning. What we don’t win through democracy we’ll win through arms.
If there is a King or Emperor or Dictator he’ll win through us.

A scheme for ruling men that’s inhuman and misanthropic – we have that now, we already tried several other versions.
GodEmperorTrumpenFuerher is Elected by us, BREXIT by us, LePen and Wilders are rising through us.

that rising number of personal quedtions, for me personally neoreationary journey was very rewarding and satisfying. re learning, re discovering, re engaging, re delusioning, re actualising. communitarianism with sole purpose of intellectual survival can be tollerated, what is other options.

“Opponents of the leftist consensus in academia do not even count as intellectuals because of the positions they take. By that logic it is defensible to eliminate such people from graduate programs, deny them tenure, even to shout them down”

Mr. Knaphni you have some phenomenal language abilities, were you raised on English? ‘Tentativises’ has only two proper results on Google, in «Pragmatic Markers in Irish English» from 2015 and «NEO-CONFESSARIUS PRACTICE INSTRUCTUS» from 1763.

I learnt English myself before even classes started in 5th grade, without any effort. Just from watching TV. Like not even giving it a thought, it just seeped in through the years as a small kid altho everyone spoke Icelandic around me. Starting when I was 15 Americans ask if I’m American when they hear me speak. Still learning.

I’ve been able to read some French, Italian and Spanish now just from looking up English etymology for a few years because English is so much based on Latin. It should be called Neo-Latin or Anglo-Latin, and ‘Latin’ as a term should be wholly divorced from Mestizos who have almost nothing to do with the Latins who were one of the original Roman tribes; Mestizos having inherited by almost chance a derivative of their language. I often think of ‘new’ English words only to google them and see them in 17th century English books! Or 15th century books in Latin. Or I did before ; I haven’t been that inspired in that regard for quite some time now. I am also able to decipher words in my native tongue that people use every day but don’t know what they mean except in the derived mundane context.

arty youre just a commie with a hindu fetish which is cool since youre a wog but basically youre a brown nazi.
This clap trap about having to get away from failed materialism might make sense from a ceratin perspective, but you’re just off on a socialism rant, The problem is not that reason and capitalism have not worked its that they have been as yet unable to escape the old morality. That morality is religion of universal brotherhood, whether christian hindi buddhist its all the same. So no we dont need to settle it for dialectics sake. We need to burn it to the ground and salt the earth.We are not all one. The largest organization we can sustain is an ethno state